what are Riches, Empire, Power,
But larger Means to gratifie the Will?
The Steps on which we tread, to rise and reach
Our Wish; and that obtain’d down with the Scaffolding
Of Sceptres, Crowns, and Thrones; they’ve serv’d their End,
And are like Lumber, to be left and scorn’d.
12 The Pilgrims of the Rhine, 1834, quoted approvingly by the sixteen-year-old Ruskin in 1836 in his “Essay on Literature,” in Three Letters and an Essay on Literature by John Ruskin, 1836–1841: Found in His Tutor’s Desk (George Allen, 1893), p. 36.
13 The essay is in the Penguin Classics edition, Selected Short Fiction, ed. Deborah A. Thomas, p. 131. In Dickens’s “Seven Dials,” included in the Penguin collection, there are “shops for the purchase of rags, bones, old iron, and kitchen-stuff” but no lumber-rooms. This may be as good a place as any to point out, if nobody has, that one of Leigh Hunt’s essays from The Indicator, published in 1833, contains a sentence that was possibly the piece of old iron that Dickens hammered and alloyed into the entirety of The Old Curiosity Shop. In “Of the Sight of Shops,” Hunt writes:
The curiosity-shop is sometimes very amusing, with its mandarins, stuffed birds, odd old carved faces, and a variety of things as indescribable as bits of dreams.
Here is Dickens’s version in the first chapter of The Old Curiosity Shop:
There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.
14 “But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is, — his thought richer, and his influence of wider application, — was that he should have read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him.” (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”)
15 In his critical prose, that is. “Rugby Chapel” and the corded bales at the end of “The Scholar-Gypsy” are awfully good.
16 Saintsbury seems to be half-remembering the aforequoted passages of Shelley here, or perhaps paraphrasing Horace, who had said some helpful things in his Art of Poetry about how difficult it is to treat in one’s own way what is common (line 128), and about the desirability of a poetry made of familiar things (line 240), and about the “beauty that may crown the commonplace” (line 243) — passages more helpful when pulled out of context, as they frequently were. (For instance, the “unutterably tedious” Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten writes in his Reflections on Poetry that a “confused recognition, if it occurs, represents in the most poetic way a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar,” and then he says, “Hence Horace, ‘I should look for my poetic fictions in familiar things.’ ”) In one of the early translations into English of Horace’s Ars Poetica, by Oldham (1683), a word leaps up:
For there’s no second Rate in Poetry
A dull insipid Writer none can bear,
In every place he is the publick jeer,
And Lumber of the Shops and Stationer.
17 Some lines from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy help explain Bishop’s choice of Crusoe. In the chapter called “The Ethics of Elfland” he says that Robinson Crusoe “celebrates the poetry of limits,” and then writes: “Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.” I must thank my mother for reminding me of this passage. “ ‘Saved from the wreck,’ as Chesterton said, ‘saved from the wreck,’ ”she said, helping her grandchildren build a lean- to out of sticks on a beach.
18 Michele Fagan said by phone that the “Mystery” in her title was an editorial addition — she had intended it simply to be “A Tour Through the Lumber Room.” The Beatles reference does confuse things a little. Her essay is a survey of the oddments that can be found in old census reports; I found it by searching the Wilson Library Literature CD-ROM.
19 The WELL, Miscellaneous Conference, Topic 871, no. 8, September 22, 1993. The topic has since been retired and frozen and is no longer extractable unless you add an “-r” (for “retired”) to the command string; i.e., “!extract — f ‘lumber of my life’ — r misc.” If it is like most topics, it will eventually be deleted entirely, and my citation of it will be the only record of its existence. Electronic media have an underdeveloped sense of the value of their own history; all but a small fraction of what was actually posted on the WELL since 1985 has vanished.
20 What got Bishop interested in lumber? Had she been reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who is her kind of writer in several ways, funny and observant and lesbian and mail-loving, and who has a passage in a letter of October 10, 1716 (partially quoted in the OED’s history of lumber) about the cabinets of curiosities in the Emperor’s repository in Vienna? It sounds a lot like Bishop: “Two of the rooms were wholly filled with relics of all kinds, set in jewels, amongst which I was desired to observe a crucifix, that they assured me had spoken very wisely to the Emperor Leopold. I won’t trouble you with the catalogue of the rest of the lumber; but I must not forget to mention a small piece of loadstone that held up an anchor of steel too heavy for me to lift.” Horace Walpole, another letter-writer who would have appealed to Bishop, cattily dismisses Versailles (a symbol of civilization one could set in opposition to Crusoe’s island) as a “lumber of littleness,” which is an adaptation of a couplet in one of Pope’s Moral Essays, about a uselessly grand house:
Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!
The whole, a labour’d Quarry above ground.
(I found the Walpole reference in an endnote to Essays and Criticisms, Thomas Gray, ed. Clark Sutherland Northup, 1911. Gray, on May 22, 1739, says of Versailles, “What a huge heap of littleness!”) Or had Bishop been reading Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room, which came out in 1971, about the time she may have been writing her poem: “In the dozen years or so since I had last been at Thrubworth more lumber than ever had collected in these back parts of the house, much of it no doubt brought there after requisitioning. There was an overwhelming accumulation: furniture: pictures: rolled-up carpets: packing cases.” Or had Bishop simply grown dissatisfied with “junk” and “stuff” in earlier drafts of her poem and looked in a thesaurus? It’s always a possibility.